


Storm Report

by 350dia



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Banter, Blackouts, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Living Together, M/M, Power Outage, Pre-Canon, Summer, only briefly though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27414439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/350dia/pseuds/350dia
Summary: Summer storms, for all the romance that indie songwriters and overly sappy poets like to impose onto them, really kind of suck. At least, they do for Niki Shiina, whose apartment is ill-equipped with a second-hand floor fan and a decidedly unromantic roommate.At least the power hasn’t gone out, right?-Rinne, Niki, and how to pass the time when your power goes out.
Relationships: Amagi Rinne/Shiina Niki
Comments: 5
Kudos: 72





	Storm Report

“ _Did all those years mean nothing to you? Did_ I _mean nothing to—”_

Click.

“ _—only until the 24th! That’s right, the all-new—”_

Click.

“ _—expecting some heavier storms over the next couple hours. Temperatures will be…”_

“There’s nothing good on,” Rinne announces, letting the arm holding the TV remote drop.

Niki fiddles with the wrapper of his popsicle. “We could watch a movie,” he suggests half-heartedly.

“Don’t wanna sit through one.”

Niki doesn’t really want to either, so he just lets the conversation stop at that. Rinne flips through a few more channels.

Summer storms, for all the romance that indie songwriters and overly sappy poets like to impose onto them, really kind of suck. It’s hard to imagine the mugginess that comes with them being appealing in any aspect — at least, it is for Niki, whose apartment is ill-equipped with a second-hand floor fan and a decidedly unromantic roommate. Being stuck inside with damp hair and sweaty clothing doesn’t seem like it’d be that great in any situation, though. Where’s the eroticism in suffocatingly heavy humidity?

He manages to tear open the wrapper. The popsicle is already starting to melt.

“Niki.”

Rinne’s voice is a lot closer than it was before.

Niki looks up and finds that they’re face-to-face. He isn’t even sure when Rinne made his way across the couch, but now he’s leaning over to plant one of his hands firmly on the armrest on Niki’s other side, effectively trapping him in with his upper body. He reaches up to push Niki’s sweaty bangs out of his face, eyes practically burning into him and, jeez, the close proximity is definitely _not_ helping with the heat right now.

For a moment, the only sound in the room is the rain pounding against the window and the hum of the floor fan and the low drone of a commercial advertising something-or-other on sale now for the low, low price of ¥1,999 if you call now and Niki’s throat is suddenly feeling a little dry. He swallows, hard. “What?”

Without breaking eye contact, Rinne leans down and takes a bite out of his popsicle.

Bastard.

“You’re the _worst_ ,” Niki groans, shoving him away with his free hand. Rinne cackles, pushing himself off the armrest and flopping back onto his side of the couch.

“That’s whatcha get for not getting me one, you little shit!”

“Ugh, it’s way too hot for you to be messing around,” Niki complains. His (already-bitten) popsicle drips onto his hand and he licks it, not missing the shit-eating grin Rinne shoots him. “Seriously! I already feel like I’m about to melt even without you coming over here like that!”

“What, can’t handle the heat?”

“No! It’s, like, a billion degrees right now!?”

Rinne scoots towards him and Niki glares, biting off a chunk of his popsicle in a lame attempt to eat what he can before it ends up melting all over him. “Stop.”

He shifts closer, their thighs touching now.

“Come on, Rinne-kun, it’s not funny!”

Rinne hooks an arm around Niki’s shoulders, tightening his grip sharply when Niki tries to shrug him off. Niki attempts to stand up from the couch but he holds him back, restraining him like some kind of… some kind of awful freeloading tyrant who gets a kick out of torturing him during a heat wave. It’s too hot to even think of a comparison. Struggling is only making it worse, so he just gives up and goes limp in Rinne’s grasp.

“You’re awful,” he grouses. “Seriously awful! Am I nothing but a source of entertainment to you?!”

“Yep!” Rinne confirms. The commercials end on the TV, and the second half a dubbed American cartoon begins to play. “Now shut up for a minute. Running your mouth’s only gonna make it hotter, y’know?”

Niki glares at the arm around his shoulder. _Talking_ definitely isn’t what’s making it hotter right now.

He diverts his attention away from Rinne’s ongoing murder attempt and towards what’s left of his rapidly dissolving popsicle. It’s fruit punch flavored, but that alone is never enough to tell Niki what it’ll be like, considering every brand’s fruit punch flavor tastes different to him. Rinne always insists he’s just overthinking it. Which is kind of a fair accusation, considering Rinne probably doesn’t think at all in the first place, meaning any level of thought is overthinking in comparison to what he’s doing. (Rinne punched him when he said that.) This brand tastes more like cherry with an edge of grape than anything else — not as much emphasis on the orange flavoring as the last kind they got. Not that any of it really matters, considering it’s currently melting into nothing but sticky sugar liquid on his hand faster than he can keep up.

It sounds like the weather is picking up outside. It’s been drizzling on and off all day, but it’s really storming now; it’s only half past nine but it may as well be midnight, with how dark it is. The sound of the rain against the window would be soothing if it weren’t for the fact that the humidity is making the heat feel about a thousand times worse. Eugh. Summer can’t end soon enough.

At the next commercial break, Niki dislodges himself from Rinne’s grip and stands up from the couch, grimacing. His t-shirt is stuck to his back with sweat and his hand is all sticky from the popsicle. Gross.

“Aw, leaving me already, Niki-kyun?”

“It’s not like you haven’t given me any reason to,” Niki grumbles without much conviction. “I’m gonna go showe—”

_Click._

The room is plunged into darkness. A split second later, the whirring of the floor fan shuts off.

Mother Nature must finally be getting her revenge for the misdeeds of mankind, Niki realizes. This is it. He can sense her murderous intent.

“Hol’ on,” Rinne’s voice says from behind him. There’s some rustling sounds before a small light cuts through the darkness and Niki can see him holding up his phone flashlight. “Oooh, that’s a pretty scary face, Niki! Should I be worried about being alone with you in the dark right now?”

Probably. Niki takes a deep breath. “How much charge do you have?” he asks instead, voice tight to his own ears.

“14%. You?”

“Um…” Niki retrieves his phone from the coffee table. “…29%.”

Rinne stands up from the couch, grinning in a way that kind of makes Niki feel some murderous intent of his own. “Kyahaha! Guess you should choose your last phone call wisely!”

“You’re making things worse!” Niki heads over to the kitchen, familiar enough with the layout of the apartment to get around without tripping over something and cracking his head open on the floor (although the prospect of that is growing more and more appealing with every second they don’t have electricity). He throws out his popsicle stick and washes his hands, trying to not think about all the food going bad in the fridge at this very moment.

“Rinne-kun, do you remember where the flashlight is?” he calls.

“What flashlight?”

“The red plastic one? I think you had it last Halloween when you told that really bad ghost story and then put me in a headlock when I said it wasn’t scary?”

“Oi, watch it.” There’s some rustling around in the living room. “Don’t see it.”

Niki steps out of the kitchen. “Did you check in the TV stand?”

“ _Yes_. Have a little faith in my finding skills.”

He rolls his eyes even though Rinne can’t see him. “Ugh, okay. I guess I’ll check… the closet, maybe?”

“What’s the point? Even if you do find it, it’s not like there’s much you can do with the power out. Unless you’re planning on, like, reading a book or something, but I’m half convinced you’re illiterate so—”

“Why am I being attacked right now!” Rinne just laughs. “What exactly would you recommend I do instead of looking, then?”

Rinne, predictably, replies with a quip about knowing of a certain activity that relies less on vision and more on touch. Specifically, the act of touching. More specifically, the act of Rinne touching—

Fun fact: over the past couple years, Niki has gotten pretty good at tuning him out.

A quick scan of the bedroom turns up with no flashlight. A slightly more thorough scan of the closet turns up with… a 10-yen coin and a jacket Niki thought he lost. Still no flashlight. He half-heartedly bends down and glances under the bed, being met with the unsurprising sight of nothing but darkness.

“Damn, it’s hot as balls in here!” Rinne’s voice says from somewhere on the bed. Niki can somewhat make out the vague shape of him lying on top of the covers when he straightens up.

“It’s hot _everywhere_ ,” he gripes, finally giving up and sitting down on the edge of the bed. He glances at his phone — it’s dropped to 19% — and mentally vows to look for a model with better battery life as soon as possible. They’re both quiet for a few seconds. “Maybe we should check in with the neighbors…?”

“Naw. They’re probably banging right now.” (It’s true that the couple next door tends to get a bit noisy during their more… intimate moments. Which they happen to have a lot of.)

Niki furrows his brow. “What about Sasaki-san?”

“The milf across the hall? I’ll go check in on her, all right.”

“Ew, stop! She’s a nice lady, don’t say things like that.”

“Aw, is Niki-kyun jealous?”

“No, I just feel morally obligated to protect the elderly of this apartment building from you!”

Rinne cackles. Jerk. Niki doesn’t doubt for a moment that he’d probably hit on anyone in the building — there have already been a couple times where Niki’s practically had to drag him away from fellow tenants out of embarrassment. How did the cold, sharp-tongued teenager Niki picked up off the streets two years ago turn into _this_?

He sighs. Well, at least power outages are a lot less boring with someone else there, even if that someone happens to be a huge asshole. Not that he’d ever admit he likes the company. 

Rinne probably already knows, anyways. Ugh. Him and his stupid good sense of observation.

There’s a flash of lightning from outside that illuminates the room for a split second. Niki glances at Rinne and finds himself making eye contact.

“What?” he asks somewhat defensively, as the accompanying clap of thunder rings out.

“What, I can’t look at you?”

Niki frowns, tugging off his shirt and tossing it towards the foot of the bed before flopping back onto the covers, one of his legs still hanging off the side. “That sounds creepy when you say it.”

“I don’t wanna hear it from the guy who’s stripping on the same bed as me.”

“It’s hot!” It’s true — if the room was sweltering _with_ air conditioning, it’s almost unbearable now.

Rinne lets out a little _psh_ sound. “Yeah, but if I started taking my clothes off it’d be the end of the world.”

“Um, that would only be because you make it into a big thing where you accuse me of checking you out every time you get undressed, you know?”

“Maybe if you weren’t always hitting on me I wouldn’t have to be on the defensive, dumbass! It’s like I can never escape your objectifying gaze!”

“Hold on, that’s inaccurate no matter which way you look at it, isn’t it?!”

Their usual banter is actually kind of nice. This isn’t their first power outage together — there was one a couple months after they met, back when Niki was still in school — but they weren’t nearly as close back then. At least, not “passing time by lying next to each other bickering in the dark” close. Last time, they chatted for just a bit before settling into their own separate activities; this time, Niki realizes he can’t think of anything else he could be doing right now. 

Of course, Rinne would never let him hear the end of it if he told him that.

(To be completely fair, though, the last outage was in the middle of the day, so they still had light. It’s a lot harder to find stuff to do when it’s pitch black. Which means talking to Rinne is really just a last resort. That’s what he’d tell him, at least.)

After a little while, Niki can hear Rinne sit up and stretch. “Shit, dude, I would’ve gotten some booze if I knew we were gonna be stuck like this. This’d probably be a lot more fun if we were shitfaced.”

Niki raises his eyebrows. “You’re still too young to buy it in the first place, though?”

“You aren’t thinking hard enough, Niki. Anything’s possible when you’re as smooth as Amagi Rinne-kun! Just gotta appeal to the clerk, yanno?” Niki hears him shift around and then he’s murmuring right into his ear, breath hot on his skin. “ _C’mon, nii-san, you can let it slide, right? A couple months more or less doesn’t make a big difference… it’ll be our little secret, okay?_ ”

Niki shudders and shoves him away. “Eugh, stop, stop! _Creepy!_ ” 

Rinne falls back onto the bed, laughing. “At least I don’t need to be drunk to fuck with you!”

“Ugh… is this what the teachers meant when they’d tell us to ignore troublemakers if we want them to stop…?” Niki laments. Rinne scoffs.

“Teachers just spout whatever bullshit’ll prepare you to become another cog in the machine. Forget about all of that! ‘S more fun with you home all the time now, anyways. Really makes it feel like the married life.”

“No, I keep telling you that it’s impossible for us to get married? First of all, I’m still a minor…”

“So what! Maybe by the time you’re an adult this country will have shaped up its marriage laws a little.”

Niki sighs. “You’ve been dragging this joke on for way too long, you know? Bringing up marriage all the time — it’s starting to get kind of old.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know I have my priorities, too. Marriage is a big deal, Niki.” He sounds a little bit less like he’s joking, this time, making whatever reply Niki had ready die in his throat.

The difficult part about having a conversation in the dark is not being able to see each other; Rinne being reduced to nothing but a disembodied voice is really kind of messing with the flow of things. Niki frowns into the blackness for a few beats before propping himself up on one elbow and looking down at Rinne. Or, what he can make out of him in the dark, at least.

“Jeez. It’s impossible to tell what your priorities are when you act the way you do, you know?”

Rinne is looking up at him unconcernedly. “Hmm. Maybe it is when you only have two brain cells.” Rude. Niki opens his mouth to respond, but Rinne continues before he can, voice mock-hurt. “It’s kind of painful, actually, that my feelings still haven’t reached you after all this time ‘cuz you’re always dodging them… Poor Rinne-kun, doomed to the biting cold of unrequited love forever…”

“See, you’re doing it again! Can’t you—”

“It’s not rocket science, dumbass!”

Niki just looks at him. Rinne’s eyes flit around his face, lingering on his lips for just a split second too long, before he lets out a light laugh. 

“Dunno how many times I have to say I’m into you before it gets through that thick skull of yours.”

Niki ignores the stifling heat for a moment to lean in closer and, even in the dim lighting, he can see Rinne’s eyes widen for just a second. Their faces are close, much too close, and the proximity combined with the warmth is making his head spin.

He swallows and focuses on Rinne as he murmurs, barely loud enough to be heard over the rain, “Maybe you should say it one more time to make sure you’re clear?”

What is he saying? How did the mood change so quickly? Where did all the air in the room go? Why does Rinne Amagi, king of flirting for fun and general assholery, look kind of _flustered?_

The tip of Rinne’s tongue darts out, wetting his lips, and Niki’s breath feels caught in his throat as he holds his gaze.

“...I—”

_Click._

The room is suddenly a lot brighter than it had been a second ago.

Niki jumps and their foreheads knock together. Rinne curses as Niki jolts back, gritting his teeth. “The hell’re you doing!”

“It startled me!” Niki whines. He squints up at the ceiling light. “Is the power back, or did I die of the heat?”

“You’re still alive,” Rinne confirms. “The mood isn’t, though.” He’s more than just a little flushed, Niki notices, but it’s hard to say whether it’s from the heat or from something else. “Man, and right when it was getting good, too! That was totally a new side to you, Niki-kyun!”

Niki groans and stands up, half so he can go check to make sure nothing in the fridge went bad and half because he’s kind of embarrassed. “…Go turn off the TV if you aren’t gonna watch anything else.” He can hear the commercials running from here.

Rinne lets out one of his stupid hyena laughs. “The TV isn’t the only thing that’s turned on, yanno!”

“Ugh, stop.”

“Haha! You’re all red in the face!”

Niki is already on his way to the kitchen. “Shut up!”

“Love you too, Niki!”

(Later, Niki finds the red plastic flashlight in the TV stand — you know, the one Rinne _said_ he had checked — but he just gets a laugh in response when he brings it up.)

**Author's Note:**

> and they were roommates


End file.
